Planning on doing an Exchange 2003 physical to virtual migration to a new vSphere 4.1 host. I'm assuming that I will need to stop all the Exchange services prior to doing the conversion and running the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer is also on my "this makes sense" list. I should note that there's just one Exchange Server in this environment.
Not seeing any real best practices/guidelines online out there. Can anyone recommend or outline the steps for doing this successfully?
EDIT
Just to clarify: I'm more concerned with ensuring that Exchange is a consistent/error-free state before attempting the conversion. I'd also like a method/process for testing this consistency, post-conversion.
As part of my testing, I was going to setup a workstation VM with an Exchange profile on the same ESXi host as the converted Exchange that's on the same subnet, but on a vSwitch that's not uplinked to the production environment. I was then going to open several mailboxes, etc. something like that anyways.
I was also planning on simulating mail delivery by setting up a Postfix/DNS VM with some test MX records, but I gather that without a domain controller, Exchange is likely not going to function properly in this isolated vNetwork, but that I don't know as my AD knowledge isn't great.